‘It’s easy to reduce everything down to cup holders’: What the auto industry needs to know about women
Automotive brands can reduce everything down to cup holders and swatches on colour, but they really do not understand the female consumer, said Fiorella Di Santo, Bauer Media’s director of sales.
“The car industry is overwhelmingly dominated by males, but its main customers are female,” Di Santo said.
Presenting to an audience at Mumbrella’s Automotive Marketing Summit, Di Santo said while the car industry was “overwhelmingly dominated by males”, not only are automotive brands not satisfying its main customers – women – but at times, they are “making a mess” of communicating with them.
Di Santo: Car industry is “overwhelmingly dominated by males”
What they need to know? She’s the driver. I mean that both in terms of ‘75% plus of all significant family purchase decisions are driven primarily by women, even in a relationship’ and ‘she drives the car’
Every dent on the vehicle, *I* put there. And both clutch replacements. She is the one who can drive naturally, safely, and she’s the one who decides the seat position, the engine size and went manual for the sheer pleasure of driving.
And yes, we did walk out of several showrooms, who employed dickheads to walked up to me to try and close the deal, even though she was the one who did all the talking.
There is no male-female balance in the forming of creative opinions, especially in experiential agencies. The female roles are in production and logistics, while the male roles are account management and creative.
Automotive companies need to demand that women from agencies participate in value-add roles. But don’t hold your breath for that.
The old-guard of experiential agencies who’ve been around for years with long automotive histories, completely exclude females from the creative process and from account management meetings with clients. They are the worst offenders.
It’s at that critical point when strategy and creative are outlined to the client, that women are excluded. I’ve seen it first hand, a hundred times. Old men swaggering in to the presentation meeting, talking about the football or dated blokey topics to their blokey client, running through their same-old concepts.
When you invite a woman you’re mentoring creatively to join these meetings, you’re over-ruled. It’s not a by-product of the age of the managers either. I’ve seen 30-something managers play this exclusion game. It’s with the biggest auto brands too, who publicly claim to practise equal opportunity. But don’t.
These wannabe alpha males (omega males in reality) want to be seen as having ‘brought home the bacon’, so they’re not going to share the moment. The women who aspire to influence don’t want to rock the boat in what is for employees, a revolving-door industry, and the cycle continues.